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Faces of Toronto’s homeless youth

Every weekday morning a crowd gathers outside a storefront on Yonge St., just north of the Eaton Centre, eager for the door to open so they can get inside.

They’re not looking to get their hands on cut-price retail deals or the latest foodie fad offering.

Meet Pandora, part of the Star's profile of homeless youth living in Toronto, on what people might find most surprising about them.

They’re homeless youth who have come to the Evergreen Centre for Street Youth looking for a meal, health care and help finding work.

Each day, about 150 youth pass through Evergreen’s door, a few blocks from the intersection at Yonge and Dundas, the crossroads of Canada’s busiest shopping district. It may also be the epicentre of youth homelessness in this country.

On a given night, 6,000 people across Canada between 16 and 24 have nowhere to call home, representing 20 per cent of the total homeless population. In Toronto, estimates range from 900 to 2,000 nightly — far more than can be accommodated by the 489 beds in youth shelters.

Many homeless youth end up on Yonge St., attracted to gathering spots like the Eaton Centre and Yonge-Dundas Square, as well as services such as Evergreen and nearby Covenant House, Canada’s largest shelter for street-involved youth.

“Our centre deals with a lot of the extreme cases,” says Jesse Sudirgo, manager at Evergreen, who says the drop-in’s clients are often dealing with serious mental health or drug addiction issues. Many are involved in sex work. “Prostitution’s huge.”

The paths young people take to life on the street differ, but according to Covenant House, about 70 per cent of the shelter’s clients left home because of family dysfunction, which could include abuse, neglect or parents’ addictions. Poverty can play a role, but about half of the facility’s clients come from middle- and upper-income families, according to the shelter’s management.

Many homeless youth are fleeing situations where they felt like outcasts or were bullied. More than one in five youth shelter users identify as LGBTQ, according to the city’s Street Needs Assessment.

Sudirgo believes it’s easier to get homeless youth on the right path than it is their older counterparts. But the stakes are high. The longer a youth stays in shelters or on the streets, the greater the risk he or she will become homeless for the long term.

“They get entrenched in street life if we let them stay homeless very long, and here in Toronto we’ve got a big problem,” says Stephen Gaetz, the director of the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness and a professor at York University’s faculty of education. He notes that homeless youth in the city remain unhoused for an average of 1.5 years, a statistic he calls “horrible.”

In Toronto, as many as 2,000 youth have nowhere to call home at night — far more than can be accommodated by the 489 beds in youth shelters. Joel Zola, 22, is one of them. (Melissa Renwick / Toronto Star)

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“It doesn’t take very long when someone is street-involved, that their health decreases . . . mental health gets worse, their likelihood of being exploited either in the sex trade or through criminal involvement increases,” Gaetz says.

The supports that young homeless people need to keep them off the streets are different from the adult population. Most young people who leave home lack basic life skills that would allow them to rent an apartment, make financial plans, or even cook for themselves. They’re not only dealing with a lack of housing, but are also likely facing the loss of family relationships and other social ties that were severed when they left home, and doing so at a time when they’re undergoing the turbulent psychological changes that accompany young adulthood.

Covenant House attempts to address all of these issues by offering multiple supports under the same roof, including employment and apprenticeship programs, food and clothing banks, an on-site school and a drop-in centre. The facility has 94 emergency shelter bed spaces, and 31 spots in transitional housing.

Bruce Rivers, Covenant House’s executive director, says the shelter’s three goals are to provide stabilized housing, access to education and employment, and peace of mind.

“If you do all three of those at the same time, you can make significant progress,” he says.

Rivers says he’s seen a lot of success stories at Covenant House, particularly in the shelter’s Cooking for Life program, which connects youth to apprenticeships in the restaurant sector. Between 60 and 70 per cent of participants end up with a job, according to Rivers.

For all the good work that Covenant House does, Gaetz believes that Canada’s supports for homeless youth focus too much on emergency shelters, instead of supplying long-term housing and preventing young people from losing their homes in the first place.

“We can’t be picking up the broken bodies at the bottom of the hill forever. At some point we’ve got to go to the top of the hill and wonder why they’re getting pushed off.”

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